Their chase was now to end. Their attention, rapt as they had been in the pursuit they loved above all others, could not now escape the sudden sound which broke upon their ears even over the hoof roar of the buffalo.
In a vast rush of crackling hoofs and rattling horns the entire Del Sol herd was now off in the wildest stampede any of the men had ever seen. Worst of all, they were not undertaking to evade but to join the stampede of the buffalo.
Always there was a sort of affiliation between the wild and the domestic cattle of the Plains; and all old plainsmen knew how difficult it was to separate the two, once they were commingled. This commingling of wild and half wild, with the attendant rumbling and trembling under the hoofs of all these thousands of running creatures, made a swift climax to the scene. The black mass, lengthened and strung out by the impact of the line of hunters, now was joined by a vast influx of lighter colored animals, coming in at an angle. Red men might take toll of this. White men could not control it. No men could stop it now.
The savages had ridden long. There was an endless line of black blots rising and falling on the prairies back of them. The stampede of the Del Sol herd was sufficient to break the trance of slaughter.
Spears in hand, naked, their arms red to the shoulders, their bodies red to the waist, a group of the riders broke away from their chase and came up, grinning and shouting, to where they saw the white men huddled. They had taken their time. The Comanches entertained but little fear of the whites. They were insolent lords of the far Southwest, raiding the feeble Mexicans as they liked and even imperiously telling the Anglo-Saxon frontiersman when he must cease advancing or even pull back his frontier lines. They always had held the best of the cattle range as well as the best of the buffalo range of Texas, and had kept the cowman out.
These had no fear now of the whites. They carried with them proof of that. Repeating their own tribal history of grim sense of humor, at some sutler’s store looted far to the west they had practiced one of the jests they had been known to employ in early border times. They had gathered bolts of flannel, bales of gaudy calico, from which they had liberally taken decorations for their horses. Not one of the latter that did not have attached to his mane and tail such strips of calico as long and rough riding had left him. It was the pleasant Comanche practice to tie one end of a bolt of cloth or calico to the tail of a horse and then to ride off, leaving the fabric to unwind as it listed and the horse to run as it chose. These wild decorations, unknown of origin, still clung in colored fragments to the blood-stained ponies which they rode. The ends of the prints fluttered in the prairie wind, mocking the flowers in their own remaining hues.
